Dancing in Life's Whirling Embrace!

March 2019

March 08, 2019

This week’s Parashah (Parashat Pekudei: Exodus 38:21-40:38), as last week’s reading did, opens a door to us to consider how it is to have heart to create and craft beauty. Last week, just as the Holy is described at the beginning of Genesis creating, in the descriptions of the people gladly and open-heartedly bringing their contributions and the artists crafting those into wonderful being we have a chance to pause and reflect on our own creativity and connection to freedom, wholeness and well-being. The work is completed in this week’s reading and blessed by sacred residence. In other words: how do we creatively make room for the Holy in our lives?

I love to knit. I generally enjoy the whole process from selecting yarn to finishing. I enjoy adding to beauty in the world. But you know, when I am angry, frustrated, and hurting, my knitting isn’t the same. Then my yarn snarls, my stitches drop, my gladness in the process evaporates. When that’s happening, I know I need to stop and attend to my heart enough to be able to pick up knitting and let the craft finish the work of balancing and healing. While knitting is wonderful — and so too for every other craft I’ve ever put my hands to - there’s a space of vulnerability and loving expectation needed for me to make anything beautiful (and that includes the things that are not beautiful to me but are to other people, like the eyeball scarf I knit for one of my brothers). My knitting may be mechanically skillful, but unless I can bring my whole heart to it, there’s no room for spirit. When I’m holding back because of distraction, fear, worry, grief, anger or pain, then my knitting is less than it can be because I am less than whole. When I’m wholly present, then there is also room for sacred presence, for love, compassion, kindness, mercy, imperfection, failure, learning, repair, and renewal. As in my craft, so too in the rest of my life.

Some of my life I have not felt free to be my whole self. I’ve been told directly and indirectly my whole self is too big, too loud, too intense, not enough, and even bad and wrong. Now I expect to fail, to be insufficient at times, to be bad and wrong at times, but those are never synonymous with my whole self. To be more fully and freely myself has at times been an act of resistance, of claiming and naming and honoring the wholeness and weirdness that I am. I am imperfect. I fail. I make mistakes. I need to forgive and to ask for forgiveness, just like every other person I’ve ever met. But in the larger culture where I live, there is so much shame to any of these realities, to the truth of being human, needing one another, needing this earth, needing love and dignity and respect, needing….anything. The beauty of creating with our whole selves, imperfect as we are, vulnerable as we are, is that those needs are also spaces for others to show up in, spaces for the sacred, spaces to lean into and learn into, a spaciousness we need for continual personal and spiritual growth as individuals, friends, families, communities, and our world. When I’m knitting, I’m making little loops. Knitted fabric is full of spaciousness and sometimes I will breathe a little welcome to the sacred, a little blessing for the one receiving the knitted item, a little prayer of well-being for all of us connected made visible with a few yards of yarn what is already true.

In a brutal culture, where vulnerabilities are used to exploit and gain power over others, our creativity tends to be channeled into basic survival. We may have moments of offering up skillful beauty, but they’re fleeting and hidden or they’re for someone else’s pleasure so we can survive. Creating beauty for ourselves freely as much as we might wish with the materials and tools and skills available to us is creating space for us to be most fully ourselves. We can’t be our whole selves most of the time without our vulnerabilities, because none of us are perfect or invulnerable, or don’t have doubts, or don’t have stuff to learn, or never make mistakes. Making mistakes and learning from them is vital to art and craft. Failing and trying again, failing and making amends, failing and seeking and offering forgiveness are all vital to being wholehearted people. But that means creating with our vulnerabilities.

We have vulnerabilities whether or not we wish to admit them. Human beings are what primatologists call obligatorily gregarious. We need one another because alone and apart we are insufficient. We need society, community, family, and friends. We need relationships of love and compassion as much as we need good food and clean water and clean air and a safe space to sleep. Any need creates a vulnerability. Slaving and other exploitive societies use our need for one another against our own best interests to serve the interests of another. When we’re socialized to exploit others or be exploited, which can happen whether we are the exploiters or the exploited, it takes time to learn to lean into our vulnerabilities and to hold one another more graciously. It takes time to heal the wounded heart. But that wounded heart won’t heal in isolation. We need one another.

As Moses finishes anointing the beautiful, freely, whole-heartedly created items the people lovingly created, gladly gave, and dare to risk hoping the Holy will find pleasing, we might take a collective breath with all those gathered. Will these creative, whole-hearted offerings be acceptable? Are we and the fruits of what we bring worthy? And then collectively we can sigh with delight and relief when the cloud covers the tent of meeting and the glory of the Holy fills the tabernacle. Because the answer is: yes. The people risked faithfully to create wholeheartedly and offer those gifts. May we do the same with our lives: risking faithfully, setting down the shame, and picking up the creative process for goodness’ sake, for wholeness, for healing, for adding to this world’s astounding beauty moment by moment and breath by breath.

March 01, 2019

Parashat Vayakhel (Exodus 35:1-38:20) teaches about Sabbath-keeping and about meaningful work in freedom. As free people, both rest and work have different meanings than when the people were enslaved, such different meanings that we might discuss dignity and work in evaluating whether a particular workplace or type of work is sliding into the practices of indenture or slavery by whether it accords space for dignity and respect. In forced labor, there really is no period of true rest. In American slavery, what little “time off” was spent cultivating or seeking food for survival, tending to living quarters, and other daily work just to survive. Because of the rules in the Torah for treating servants and indentured labor, we can presume that such was not an unusual approach — and that way of treating folks is expressly forbidden through those same rules that everyone be granted Sabbath, and that everyone have time for religious practice, and other rules that apply to everyone, free or not. Unitarian Universalists may wish to consider how fulfilling that faithful promise of affirming and promoting the inherent worth and dignity of every person is connected to our requirements and culture around labor, busyness, choosing spiritual disciplines, and setting aside time to be still, to be in awe, to be thankful.

In freedom, the people are invited to worship if their hearts are so moved. They can contribute to making a beautiful worshipful space and time if their hearts are so moved. There is freedom from compulsion, inviting people to choose open-heartedly. In freedom, the people are invited to choose the Holy, but there is true choice here. Just because the Holy has chosen the people does not create an obligation. Freedom opens the door to mutual respect and care that grows out of taking responsibility for ourselves. Enslavement and imprisonment strip us of our responsibilities and choices, and so, our freedom. What is substituted is someone else’s agenda, expectations for behavior, and options for us to exercise our responsibilities and choices. And yet, humanity resists in both enslavement and imprisonment. Folks insist on dignity in little ways of countering the dehumanizing and demeaning conditions. Folks make tiny choices, such as breathing five times before responding to an insult or loving despite the restrictions on loving.

Outside of enslavement and imprisonment, as adults, the greatest loss of any freedom is when we are prevented from bearing any responsibility for ourselves. That is not the same as being completely independent or apart from everyone. Even when I was stuck in bed and unable to move myself without external assistance, I still could be responsible for my feelings and how I interacted with caregivers, family, and friends. I was responsible for whether I treated others with dignity and respect, or whether I cultivated a thankful heart, or whether I could be more generous than seemed easy or even possible. Free and responsible, I was responsible for my spiritual practices. I freely chose to share those digitally with the wider world, as what I could offer then for the well-being of others. I was free to assert as much dignity as I could, to live into that dignity through my chosen responsibilities and what mutuality I could have with others. Most of us are facing daily severe constraints on how we live, for most of us have to do what we can to make ends meet and survive, within our economic and political systems. When and where do we explore our free choices when so many of the choices we have to make are do X to make ends meet or starve or cause your family suffering or lose where you lay your head to sleep a few hours.

Entering the Sabbath gates, one voluntarily takes on certain restrictions in order to experience a different kind of freedom, a true cessation of work, and time and space to dwell in awe and wonder and thanksgiving and tender care of each other that otherwise tends to be pushed aside during our regular days of labor. It is true, many of us rush to cram the work of daily living as well as the work of our livelihoods in before the Sabbath begins. This has something to do with how rushed and busy our lives can tend to be, and the general cultural assessment of worthiness of people by how busy they are (and so pressure to fill every moment with usefulness, defined in a capitalist system as making money and accumulating wealth, that is both spoken, in law and policy - check unemployment and disability laws and policies, and internalized). Time to dwell slowly and quietly and spend hours visiting the shade under a tree or muse on clouds or play in creative and purposeless ways or even to spend hours and hours in song, prayer, and meditation becomes exceedingly precious. But there is a truth to making the space for the Sabbath that is worth considering: when we are rushing and jamming our lives with so much, frequently just to survive, we lack the spaciousness, the freedom, to feel our hearts and be still.

Sabbath-keeping invites us to a different way of being, to not be defined by what work we do or wish we could do, to not be defined by the relationships that support labor, but to encounter ourselves, each other, this splendid planet and the Holy beyond those limits and discover how to be a human being, rather than, as many have quipped, a human doing. As human beings we might discover that we choose different responsibilities than those encouraged or insisted on by our economic system. We might discover the dignity and respect that is our birthright. We might discover our whole hearts. We might heal from injuries (self- and other-inflicted) that insist we are only as worthy as how we contribute to our economy. We might find the music of our hearts, a new way for us to dance, delight and thanksgiving, unexpected and amazing blessings. There is so much we might encounter, outside the ways we are defined by how we labor for our daily nourishment. We just might meet what our hearts have hungered for that cannot be fed by busyness, or the necessary work of making ends meet, or what we do because the choices we face are indeed so limited and not much of choices at all.